This article originally appeared in the May 2011 issue of Architectural Digest.

“I am a camera,” Christopher Isherwood famously wrote, about witnessing the last bawdy days of Germany's Weimar Republic. The same phrase comes to mind—albeit in a spectacularly different setting—while touring a Hudson River Valley residence by Manhattan architect Joel Sanders. By design, it turns visitors into cinematographers, too. “The main principle,” Sanders says, “was thinking how a viewer would experience the house as if through a movie camera, circulating through it, capturing snapshots of the landscape.”

Sanders designed the minimalist two-bedroom home as a weekend getaway for a pair of New York City-based professionals: a television executive and his partner, who works in health care. At the outset both architect and clients “wanted to do something that respected the site and took down as few trees as possible,” Sanders says. To that end the mountaintop structure, partially embedded in the hillside, has a compact size (2,300 square feet) and an elegantly self-effacing air; it seems deferential to its view of the looming, pastel-shaded Catskill Mountains to the west—a vista similar to those immortalized more than a century ago by Frederic Edwin Church and other landscape painters of the Hudson River School. “It's all about this unbelievable, drop-dead, fabulous, picture-perfect Church view,” Sanders says, adding that the artist's famed home, Olana, is only a few miles from here.

You reach the house from that view, in a sense, driving up a mountain road through dense woodland. From below, the building has a shiplike look: An angled wall resembles a prow, the roof a kind of sail. A low cedar barrier defines the precinct of the residence, encompassing its terrace and pool; the private spaces are enclosed within a stuccoed concrete shell. Both wood and concrete interact balletically throughout the design.

Inside, the glass-and-bamboo entry hall sits adjacent to a courtyard garden that functions as a two-story light well, drawing in sun and air. A wide, stepped ramp spirals around it, leading from the pool terrace down to a covered dining porch. “Every path through the house culminates in a framed view of the landscape,” the architect says.

The upper level, with its expansive insulated-glass curtain wall and bamboo floor, comprises living, dining, and kitchen spaces. This luminous single room is anchored by a vast Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired fireplace clad in bamboo veneer—a vertical mass that drops down through the house and seems to tether the structure to its site. The dining area doubles as an understated kitchen, with framed photographs on the countertops and discreetly cached appliances. “The owners didn't want the kitchen to look like a kitchen,” Sanders says.

A two-bedroom weekend retreat by architect Joel Sanders features sweeping vistas of the Catskills from the cedar-clad dining porch. The slatted platform conceals a hot tub; the stools and bench are by UM Project, and the table and chairs are by Emu.

When it came to furniture, Sanders collaborated with his colleague Martyn Weaver, another architect on the project, and also sought the advice of Mark McDonald, whose gallery in nearby Hudson provided many of the home's pieces. Together with the owners, they settled on a reductive approach: “The architecture and design are so beautiful, we didn't want to distract from them,” one of the owners says. The house's modest size means only one or two items—such as the dining room's long, reflective oval table—define each space. In the carefully edited bedroom, the sinuous lines of a Wiggle chair from Frank Gehry's cardboard furniture series echo the snaking river and softly sloping mountains visible to the west.

A partial bamboo wall separates the master bedroom and main living area, while a concrete path links the two spaces. A simple pocket door provides privacy. The bedroom appears so open that stepping into the fresh air on its cantilevered balcony comes almost as a surprise: You're reminded that you were inside all along.

Space in this house seems limitless. “In the winter you have the sense of being outdoors even when you're indoors,” the owner says. “That's the beauty of the design.” On any given evening, when the residence is alive with sunset hues and the spirit of the Hudson River School painters feels close at hand, beauty is very much the operative word. The house's best vista, from the covered porch at the bottom of the spiraling ramp, is a suitably breathtaking final scene. All in all, it's a movie to remember.

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